Like a mountain - it's there. You might find it not so bad for a non-tech person. The thrill kids have when they come up with an idea, and they make it work, is fun to see. As someone else said, when you play with things like this, you come up with reasons to use it. It's a tool. It's a toy. It's a challenge. Take your pick(s).
I've read reviews written by people who bought, let's say, a small welder or some tool, to fix a broken item. Now they say, I've found so many things to do with it, I wish I had bought it years ago.
They are SO cheap, it's not a big loss if you don't like it. Just take it to your closest school and they'll know what to do with it.
I know someone who took a single wheel bike, the kind you ride in side of. Arduino ran lights around the wheel rim in changing patterns. The wheel is big, like 6 feet diameter. Very impressive at night.
But I think if Arduino does “useful work”, eg home automation, a commercial product may be out there already.
Flip side, current products may be poor quality. Imho. Once somebody owns a patent, makes some money selling it. Quality drops imho.
I really and truly can NOT imagine WHY I would need to know this stuff. Heck, I still write snail mail with a fountain pen. Sure I write emails too and message ( feebly ) with with my kids and grandkids, but I'd still rather actually write on paper.
I hate drones, not into writing programs, nor inventing anything ( I'd rather companies would brings back stuff and products that are no longer made ) so there's that. But for others, I'm certain this IS of interest and something they can and shall use.
A VERY powerful offshoot of the Arduino project is the ESP8266 Arduino, which is like an Arduino with built-in WiFi. It’s a very different chip but the Arduino system wa basically ported to it and given additional libraries to support Web pages, TCP/IP, and wireless. You can make “Internet of Things” type projects with it, and it is smaller and actually even less expensive than the Arduino. To make something like a WiFi thermometer with a web page on your home wireless network is almost trivial to do, for example.
For actual commercial non-IoT projects, I still prefer Microchip PIC’s and plain old C. The compiler is inexpensive or even free, and it has an excellent debugging system that costs at most $50. One bad thing about the Arduino environment is that it doesn’t really have an in-circuit debugger. I’m not the best programmer, but armed with a good debugger, I can do practically anything.